Wu Wei

Free WiFi and free oil

Back to my favourite occupation in Kiev: sitting in the airport on the way home, surfing the blogs that I haven't had time to read all week.

A reasonably successful trip, at least until the last day.  The political changes had replaced the Ministry official we had been working with, and we saw no reason to suppose this would be a change for the better.  Indeed we feared that we might have to start from scratch with people who saw no point in working with us.  Too late to start again, when we practically had finished our work.

But we found our new politician was favourable, making promises that things would move, and nobody else had changed.  We were complemented on our report (so not one that will sit on the shelf), and it has already been used for more awareness training for senior officials.  Moreover we found the Minister has appeared on TV to explain what he is promising to do.  Of course the new government has made lots of promises, which are thick on the ground anyway in Ukraine.  We were not sure that the Russian oil companies would be so interested in paying for oil stocks to comply with EU legislation, especially as our new guy said "It will be a good benefit for my children, not me".  However, nobody turns their nose up at a bulk purchase of oil at quite high prices, probably with new storage, paid for by the poor Ukrainian taxpayers, even if it enables the oil companies to keep their prices stable and avoid further prices rises at peak consumption as happened this summer.  This was the first crisis the new government had to deal with in August.  Of course, in a normal market economy, oil companies would not expect the state to pay for their seasonal balancing mechanism, but then in most economies, very high oil prices cause consumers to demand some action by the government.

We arrived in the ministry just at the end of a meeting described as "setting the rules of the game for the oil companies". Aren't these private companies?  Isn't there supposed to be a free market for the oil industry?  Aren't the rules of the market set by the laws in force at the time? Aren't oil companies supposed to compete rather than set the rules of the game (something called a cartel in other regions of the world)?  If there is a cartel of foreign oil companies, you wouldn't expect it to meet in the home country Ministry offices.  But then this is Ukraine.

So there will be plenty of work for somebody next year to organise the seasonal stocks under state control.  We have been asked back to help, but it's unlikely that arrangements to let a new contract will be done that quickly and otherwise I will be off to pastures new.  It's always the way.  It takes the whole contract to build a good working relationship and understand each other's point of view, so the conditions are right for getting some real work done, then it is time to stop. 

 

Technorati tags: Oil, wifi, ukraine, oil stocks

Back in Ukraine

Trying to make sense of our tasks after the summer, when we haven't done much work in August.  Luckily the oil price crisis in Ukraine has meant that we have a project that people should be interested in.  Unfortunately, with the new guys we have to start from scratch.  The big guns from the EU are here changing what they want, so we are running to keep up.  Luckily we got some important questions settled and we will come back in a couple of weeks to present everything "at the decision-making level".  We're looking forward to meeting the bandits in person.

We now have an extra trip in October, to kick off our new Agency.

Not much time for restaurant reviews yet, but had dinner with my best friend from Vilnius last night.

tags: ukraine, oil,

Windows Live Writer (and 37signals)

Now got this posting nicely, complete with Flickr4Writer and Tag4Writer  so shan't bother testing anything else.  Still pretty basic though on categories (easy to forget to put them and tags).  Reminders would be useful.

Been busy wasting time with other sorts of software.  I can report that Backpackit by 37signals(www.backpackit.com) is great for making lists for moving.  It even can send you emails and SMSs to remind you to get on with things.  Luckily for me the SMSs don't work to O2 in the UK, so I can get away with writing this.

My project in Kiev is being used to test 37signals' project management software Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), though it's hard testing it without getting other people to use it.  It's hard on collaborative projects to get other people in different firms to become early adopters, particularly when they are busy.  But I've been wanting to use this for some time, so I have just started anyway.  It will be useful experience for the next project I need to manage.

Time to do some work ... sigh.  (Not long till lunch)

tags: WLW Backpack Basecamp 37signals

Why I like my job

Or perhaps this should be titled: jack of all trades...

Sitting here contemplating the purpose of a government decree without a government, I got to thinking that I had never seen a British government decree as a legal document. Can this be true, there are no government decrees in Britain? How does the government get anything done then?

A naive non-lawyer consultant (me) might assume that a government decree/decision/resolution (call it what you will) was a convenient way to confirm that the Government was going to do something, and give individual ministries something to do as part of a coordinated government action. Some good intentions, with which to impress the EU, when not much else had been going on?

Just the sort of thing needed when actions need to be coordinated across several ministries, to persuade them to cooperate. It's not just in Yes Minister that ministries are convinced that government is a zero sum game: what one gains another loses, so they must permanently be at war, defending their territory. In Kosovo, a scheme to pay vulnerable customers for their electricity involves consultations with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Energy and Mining, the Energy Regulator, the Ministry of Social Welfare and Labour, the Power Company, the trade unions, the press and that's before you start on ethnic issues, or the "can't pay/won't" pay issue, involving UNMIk, the courts and the police. How simple to have a government decision to solve the problem of who does what, but then who would write it?

Just for a sanity check I googled government decree. The only British reference was in fact to a Home Office regulation on seal culling in 1971, with the headline "Seals shot by government decree". Not a "government" decree then. Otherwise it seems government decrees are very popular in Hungary and Finland, or at least Google finds them easy to index.

Then I remembered I had a British law book constitutional and administrative law gathering dust on my shelf, which I bought last time I had such an obscure thought.

Quotations are from Constitutional and Administrative Law by AW Bradley and KD Ewing, a book so popular it was in its 12th edition by 1997, having started out in 1931.

The chapter which should be called "how the government works" is actually called "The Cabinet, government departments and the civil service" and begins: (comments in italics added by me)

As organs of government, the Cabinet and the office of Prime Minister have evolved together since the the 18th century. Their existence is recognised in occasional statutes (for example, the Ministerial and other Salaries Act 1975), (good for them, making sure they get paid), but their powers of government derive neither from statute nor from common law administered in the courts. Parliament could confer powers directly powers directly upon the Prime Minister or upon the Cabinet. In practice this rarely happens, statutory powers being conferred either upon named ministers or upon the Queen in Council. Yet the Prime Minister and the Cabinet occupy key places at the heart of the political and governmental system. As the Prime Minister provides the individual leadership of the majority party in the House of Commons, so the Cabinet provides the collective leadership of that party. If national affairs are to be directed in any systematic way, if deliberate choices in government between competing political priorities are to be made, these decisions can only be made by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. ............

Recently more emphasis has been placed on the role of the Prime Minister and less on the Cabinet itself. ...........

Having served in the Cabinets of Eden and Macmillan, Lord Home said, "if the Cabinet discusses anything it is the Prime Minister who decides what the collective view of the Cabinet is". Different styles of political leadership exist, but Cabinet and Prime Minister depend on each other. Indeed any premature judgement about imperious prime ministerial rule in the 1980s may need to be revised in the light of Mrs Thatcher's removal from office by her party in 1990.

The joke about the vegetables comes to mind:

Thatcher and the Cabinet were out to dinner. The waiter asked Thatcher what main course she would have. "The meat". "And for the vegetables?" "They'll have the same as me."

Clearly the next edition will have some tart comments about Tony Blair's presidential style.

Further into the chapter, the operation of the Cabinet is described:

Before 1917, there was no regular machinery for preparing the agenda of Cabinet meeting, circulating documents or recording decisions. Each Prime Minister sent his own accounts of Cabinet meetings to the Sovereign and members of the Cabinet took note of matters requiring action by their departments. On a major constitutional issue, for example, the creation of peers to coerce the House of Lords into approving the Parliament Bill in 1911 (a practice followed rigorously ever since for other purposes), the Sovereign could require the Cabinet's advice to be recorded in writing. But in general there was often uncertainty about the actual decisions. (No formal government decisions here.)

In 1917, to enable the War Cabinet and its system of committees to function efficiently, a Secretary to the Cabinet was appointed to be present at the meetings of the Cabinet and its committees, to circulate minutes of the conclusions reached, to communicate decisions rapidly to those who had to act on them and also to circulate papers before meetings.

Still no formal legal format for government decisions, just conclusions, recording "agreement not controversy".

and then we come to the heading "cabinet secrecy":

The operation of the Cabinet system is surrounded by considerable secrecy. Most Cabinet papers are made available for public inspection in the Public Record Office after 30 years or after such other period as the Lord Chancellor may direct. Many Cabinet decisions are notified to Parliament or otherwise made public, but the doctrine of collective responsibility throws a heavy veil over decision-making in Cabinet.

That's great then. Tony Blair can make a government decision to go ahead with nuclear power, and keep it secret, while all the time, ministers are working to implement the decision. So much for transparent government. Only his own party could leak it to the press, or the opposition could force the Prime Minister to confess in Parliament. We all have to wait 30 years to find out what he has been up to.

That's not to say that all government actions would be covered by a government decree, if they existed, but at least we would know what the government was working on, and what actions were legally approved by government.

I like my job because it forces me to think about the way different countries do the same thing, which is more efficient, and what really matters.

You can see that if the British political system relied on coalitions of small parties, then government decisions would be very necessary to tie all the coalition partners down to an agreement, which could then be implemented without argument. But as we have single party rule for 10-15 years at a time, with dissent discouraged and papered over, what the Cabinet decides, goes, and the rest of us have to rely on the opposition to find out what the government is really up to.

Of course there is the veneer of green papers, white papers etc on energy, that imply the decision is not yet taken. But if Electricite de France is demanding the assurances of a government decision before it will build our new nuclear power plants, like it would probably have in France, then you can be sure the British nuclear lobby will not be far behind.

Oil stocks

Just a little about our work, which is to get an EU system of oil stocks implemented in Ukraine to eventually give it a 90 day buffer against Russian machinations, as well as global oil shocks.

Of course, this is rather hard to do, there being no money to buy the stocks, especially now at such high prices. Mostly arguments about who should manage the stocks are what takes up our time. Of course all current stocks are state secrets, (though probably there are none, having been stolen many years ago) or commercial secrets of the refineries (mostly owned by Russia, so not interested in Ukraine's security). All information on the refineries say they are running on hardly any stocks at all, which is hardly the way to run a commercial refinery. Of course they would say that, wouldn't they, if they smell money for some more stocks without paying for them.

In practice we are doing the groundwork for a new law to set up the framework for building up the stocks, reporting to the EU and a crisis management system for using the stocks.

And the push is for both the EU and Ukraine to have some progress when they meet in October to discuss the memorandum of understanding on energy that they signed in more hopeful days last December.

More on the gas war

Looks like Russia is not going to have it all its own way this winter, despite Gasprom having got its foot in the door in Britain already according to the FT. (subscription only)

The Jamestown Foundation reported yesteday that Ukraine is being dragged into debt by Gasprom and the (political) power vaccuum in Kiev.
more here and here

Today it reports that Turmenistan has broken with tradition and is asking for almost world prices for gas, thus undermining the winter Russian- Ukrainian deal. Depressing that none of the Ukrainian leaders are interested in the gas deal but Yulia, presumably because they are have a share of the deal and dont care about Ukraine.

On June 21, the government of Turkmenistan announced that it proposes to steeply raise the price of gas it sells to Gazprom: from $65 per 1,000 cubic meters at present to $100 in the second half of 2006. The volume of deliveries would remain constant at 30 billion cubic meters. Turkmenistan is giving Russia six weeks to sign a sale-purchase contract for the remainder of 2006 at the Turkmen-proposed price. Failing that, "Turkmenistan will stop the supplies," according to Oil and Gas Industry and Mineral Resources Minister, Gurbanmyrat Atayev, quoted by the Turkmen Ministry of Foreign Affairs communiqué. Atayev confirmed the six-week deadline and stoppage threat in a meeting with a European Parliament delegation the same day in Ashgabat.

more

There are some talks of the EU sitting in with Ukraine on any next negotiations for gas. I'd love to be a fly on the wall. And who would they choose? Someone from Ruhrgas or Winterhill, who are already in bed with Gasprom?

Plans A-G at least

Still waiting to hear about the Ukraine project. Two weeks late and counting.

The firm already making contingency plans for me to go to Syria (much more important now that Russian gas is unreliable). And some short project on import contracts for Albania. Well if they think I can do it!!

And in Kosovo the team leader was kicked out as predicted, so I am in the running for that too, as well as some of the more detailed project work. Everyone was really glad to see me back and is so friendly, it would be a shame to leave them just when they are getting their act together. But it's always the way.

Persuaded a friend with children that she should not go to Afghanistan with one of them, however desperate her home life and financial situation was. Never sure about that sort of thing. Might have been the making of her and the teenager, but then they might have both been killed. I think it only hit home when I told her she needed yo be paid 100,000 in life insurance.

It seems like I won't starve, but it would be nice to know what I am doing at the end of April. Busy writing the final report on my current project.

Service disruptions (2)

The Ministry internet has now practically ground to a halt. Usually first thing in the morning not even Skype will work. The good news is that the Ministry canteen is apparently now working again. So we descend to the garage for coffee. We find that in fact the canteen has only two tables stuck at one end of the room and is only serving coffee and tea, but what the hell, it’s better than nothing. Yesterday I got a bad headache possibly from frustration at the internet, but also possibly from caffeine withdrawal. When U (my excellent IT assistant) and I have our ritual fight to pay less than a Euro for two coffees, we both lose: today it is on the house!

However later in the morning my computer shows Skype on but no internet explorer, so no email and no google. Impossible to work with our website; impossible to check my email as the Ministry IT people have never managed to give me a proper set of instructions to use Outlook, so I am dependent on webmail.

Even worse, I can’t check my email to find out where my lunch date is, or a phone number to call the ex US senator who is teaching management at the university. If I have a number I forgot to transfer it to Outlook so it was accessible offline.

And email from within the Ministry from senior officials is not reaching me, which makes me look stupid, reminding them to do something when they have already done it. And I look negligent when I don’t respond.

What are you supposed to do for work when much of your project is internet based?

I offered to provide Ministry staff with a one hour “workshop” on the Treaty, which somehow when we discussed it turned into 4 hours worth of material, particularly as we have to have an interpreter (which doubles the time).

Now I am committed to prepare a talk on the EU, its institutions and the process of enlargement by Monday, without any basic material prepared as usual: we are supposed to know it all. But never having taken the Commission exam to become a functionnaire and get a job for life, I have only acquired a working knowledge of the Commission and not much knowledge about the rest of the EU. And without the internet, what to do?

I spent some time one summer in Athens when things were quiet reading up on the Coal and Steel Community to see what the similarities are between it and our Energy Community but never took any notes, so it is back to square one.

And in any case I need the internet to check the latest status for all the countries in terms of the EU entry process since it changes every year after the Annual Progress Report in the autumn.

While I am prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to the satellite connection, U predicts that the same problem will occur when we move downtown, where presumably we will have some proper fibre optic cable link. None of us have much faith in the ministry support staff. The ministry is not able to pay proper salaries so all the well qualified people, like U, work privately.

A minor diversion while we decide whether the ticking coming from the corner is a bomb, (unlikely as cars are the usual target and the top floor is not where the Minister sits). Eventually we trace its source to the speakers on a computer but beyond that is not clear. What the hell.

Go back home to drop briefcase and quick scan of email to find out where to meet. Some confusion over the location: I proposed the “new” Boss café, without making clear I mean the “new new” Boss café, which has appeared over the road from the old Boss café which was demolished overnight. Ex-senator is not quite up to speed with developments so says he will come to the new one by the cinema. I rush down the hill avoiding the ice, left by the incessant car washing (see next post) and make it just in time. New Boss cafe is full so we go to new new Boss after all.

Ex-senator is in a fix: the ProCredit Bank’s internet is down so no cash as no other bank seems to work with Mastercard. Also he was hiring a car to go to Thessaloniki and Hertz has run out of green card insurances, so he can’t leave Kosovo. That last is a first for me: surely this is just a bit of printed paper?

Despite this, we find a place in new new Boss, order Boss risotto (3 Euros) and settle down to explain the reasons why we are both here. He is teaching politics and policy at the new American University. The University was set up by the Kosovars at the end of the war, when they found they had not spent all the cash collected by Kosovars in America. It was intended as a thank you to America for its help in the war.

Another reason for our chat is he is interested in doing some energy consulting, and wants to find out what USAID are doing. We have already established that his ex-state is where the US consultants already in Kosovo are from, which makes a small coincidence. However we are unexpectedly joined for lunch by one of the US consultants, and they both do the usual search amongst expats for common friends and acquaintances, which surprisingly never takes that long. This time, as they have business in common, it takes only a couple of minutes to find overlapping friends.

Finally we are served with coffee and a free piece of cake, for reasons not clear but welcome. The ex-senator goes off with 6 Euros in his pocket, heading for a cashless weekend stuck in Kosovo.

Work in the Middle East

Spent most of the week trying to decide about an offer of work in Syria.

On the plus side 3 years full time (security!) creating a gas market for Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. Interesting places about which I know nothing.

On the other hand, its not an easy place to work, and we are just settled down in the UK and I don't feel like uprooting again. Bee just settled to do GCSEs and it would mean boarding school as the school in Damascus is American, not even with IB.

Women friends give conflicting opinions about what its like for women, though everyone agrees it is a great place to live.

Not awfully convinced that the Syrian gas company wants to be bothered by EU style reforms and I can't see any carrots or sticks in it for them. If they have got gas and can sell it to their neighbours what do they need new laws for.

Finally resolve it by chance by asking a colleague in Baghdad. It seems he has also been offered it and wants to accept so he can escape Baghdad. What a relief that I don't have to make a big thing and turn it down.

May be I will go later. 3 years full time seems just too much in a new region. But short term or the end of the project when we can see what is being achieved, would not be too bad.

Or am I getting old and just want to settle down again in the UK. Even though I'm not spending much time there even when I live there!

Three Hour Power cuts explained

Not often I can blog about what I'm doing, but here's a press cutting:

Serbia reportedly obstructs Kosovo power imports posted in the blog KosovaReport.

Serbia hasn't been paying for electricity transmission through Kosovo for most of a year, making KEK even less solvent than it was, making imports more likely if they can be paid for.

Doesn't augur well for the winter. And so much for the big EU Energy Treaty signing on October 25, if Serbia is already breaking agreements.

And on KosovaReport even an article like this provoked ignorant Serbian abuse.